Don't Forget The Other National Disaster

When the arrivals section of the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport's Terminal 1 went up in flames, it was interesting to watch the government spring into action. within hours, President Uhuru Kenyatta was at the scene and he stayed there for a few hours more, supposedly to supervise the admittedly crappy response. He and his mandarins were on TV and online providing regular updates. Within days, he had restructured airport security, ordered an investigation into the fire and promised to build a new terminal and fully refurbish the existing three. "We are on top of this. We will find the problem and we will fix it," seemed to be the message.

It is a complete reversal of his ostrich-like attitude to the elections in March. Despite the many failures then, we have heard nothing about an audit or about reform. Quite the contrary. His deputy has declared that the IEBC did a "fabulous job." This cavalier approach is all the more surprising given that it was a bungled election that set the country alight 5 years ago.

You would think that a burning airport would be of less consequence than a burning country. But the Kenyatta administration seems to care more for the former than the latter.

The smouldering terminal is the perfect symbol for a smouldering nation. The election fiasco has left many angry and disillusioned with the hollowness of democracy. Autocracy stalks the land. From the rehabilitation of Daniel Arap Moi to the increasingly bellicose and threatening language of the new Principal Secretaries, it is clear that the country is heading down the wrong path.

The airport fire was the result of multiple institutional failures. Over the last few days, the evidence of the country's lack of effective disaster prevention and response tragedies has been overwhelming and is leading to calls for change. Already, President Kenyatta has declared the overhaul of our national disaster services with the formation of a new agency to spearhead coordination. But what about that most severe of threats to our national fabric, the election?

The institutional failures in March must also be addressed. When the IEBC cannot say who or how many voters it registered; when all the systems meant to ensure the transparency and credibility of the poll fail; when the newly minted Supreme Court refuses to consider evidence on a technicality and offers up a moronic judgement; then we are playing with fire.

Just like there were reports of immigration and Kenya Airports Authority staff shooing people away from a small fire while leaving it to become an inferno, our politicians are shooing us into the safety of our tribal stockades while leaving the country to burn. We must resist this. The charade of "accept and move on" poses real risks down the line. If we do not seek to understand and address the problems of the last election, we will go into our next one even more divided and even more frightened.

Today the air is thick with talk of national disaster preparedness. Every pundit on TV and on the internet is offering his two cents on what failed and what needs fixing. Yet the March elections were every bit a national disaster as was the JKIA fire. And when we speak of improving our capacity to prevent and respond to disasters, we must also speak of how we are responding to the election and what we are doing to prevent catastrophe in 2017.

I, for one, would much rather see President Kenyatta taking the lead in, and giving regular updates on, that effort. And I would much rather the talking heads were putting that at the top of the national agenda. Let's get on top of this. Let's find the problem and let us fix it

Feeling the Heat?

A-Maize-ing Grace

A friend of mine once observed that no nation with a free press ever suffered a famine. He was obviously paraphrasing Amartya Sen's famous declaration that "no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy". However this powerful dictum seems lost on our leaders and our people. We still blame Mother Nature's stinginess with rain for the starvation that stalks us with depressing regularity.

Fact is famine is not an act of nature. Famine is always caused by government. It is the result, not of a deficit of food, but of a deficit of democracy. In his Democracy as a Universal Value Sen states:

Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. 

And further, in Development as Freedom, he argues that "a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threaten by famines can have". And on both counts, Kenya fares extremely poorly. 

Ever since the political class blackmailed us into accepting the coalition government as part of a ceasefire to end the carnage of early 2008, we have had no political opposition to speak of. The parties in government together have an overwhelming majority in Parliament and Cabinet ministers and their assistants actually outnumber backbenchers. And while the latter have been vocal in trying to keep the Executive on its toes, the recent reappointment of Amos Kimunya to Cabinet has shown just how little clout they actually have.

Government attacks on media freedom have also become a defining feature of the President Kibaki's tenure. No less the 4 Bills have been crafted and introduced in Parliament seeking to muzzle the Press. Two have passed and one has been signed into law. In addition, arrests of journalists and raids of media houses by hooded police and by the First Lady create an air of intimidation. So much so that even the largest media house in East Africa is afraid to broadcast its own footage of a Cabinet minister apparently confessing to orchestrating the murder of 600 people.

And when we starve we still blame God and the elements, flock to churches to beg for forgiveness for sins we neither admit nor comprehend. It is a sadly typically Kenyan reaction to avoidable disaster: when tens died in a fire less than 500m from the Fire Station, in a building full of combustible material where the fire exits were boarded up and which lacks any discernible automatic fire suppresson equipment; when over a hundred people perish while looting petrol and two days later the same thing is happening 30 km away; when 10 million go hungry because the very politicians proclaiming national emergencies have been busy looting the national granary.

Think about that next time you ask God why these things keep happening to us.

UPDATE

Today KISS FM and their sister radio stations have announced a new initiative to get more food to starving families. It's called 24 hours for Kenya and aims to, in their words, solve the hunger problem in one day so we can get on with other things. While I applaud their intentions, it is exactly this kind of thinking (or non-thinking) that guarantees famines will be with us for the foreseeable future. Not only is it plainly ridiculous to suggest that the crisis can be resolved in a matter of hours by the donation of a few basic food items, the message inherent in their ad for the campaign (every moment spent thinking about the famine costs lives) actually urges us not to concern ourselves with issues like where the maize in the Strategic Grain Reserve went, or who's to blame for the lack of preparation. By demanding that we provide emergency relief (which we should) and ignore the governance reasons that led to this crisis (which we shouldn't), such well-intentioned initiatives end up providing a salve for our national conscience while doing little to alleviate, and in the long term actually guaranteeing, the continued suffering of millions.